7 ms·

Tablet Musings

51 points by barredo 17y ago

fohlin 17y ago
Check out this week's MacBreak Weekly for more Gruber tablet speculations: http://twit.tv/mbw174 http://twit.tv/mbw174
jcnnghm 17y ago
Not including flash on a tablet seems like a mistake to me. It's one thing on a cell phone, but quite another on a device that will probably be positioned as a casual use computer.
- axod 17y ago
  The future isn't flash (IMHO). I think leaving it out makes absolute perfect sense. It also makes commercial sense - they don't want people playing flash games on the web, they want them buying games from the appstore.
  - brk 17y ago
    The future isn't flash Yeah, well the future also isn't here yet. Flash still has much relevance for any web-surfing focused product shipping today.
    - simonw 17y ago
      Yes it is, it's just not yet evenly distributed.
      - josefresco 17y ago
        So that would mean that the 'evenly distributed' future isn't here yet? Wouldn't that still make it the future? Oh wait my head asploded.
        axod 17y ago
        The point is sites are already using HTML video, websockets, canvas, etc etc etc. The future is now for websites and browsers that support it.
      - boucher 17y ago
        It really isn't. Mainstream sites still play video with Flash, and I doubt that is going to change in 2010. But, we'll see.
        tewks 17y ago
        Most people (Youtube) use flash as a wrapper around h.264; the other codecs supported are pretty terrible.
      - wensing 17y ago
        The challenge comes when a business must make the majority of its revenue off those that haven't yet received the future. Still supporting IE6, aren't we?
    - wmeredith 17y ago
      I'm not sure about this. Or I should say I am sure this is wrong for me and I'm not sure about anyone else. I do about 1/3 of my internet surfing on my iPhone, at least an hour or two a day and I rarely miss the Flash. In fact, I'd say I'm actually glad it's not there. Most of my major online annoyances are Flash powered.
    - roc 17y ago
      Except perhaps for any high profile Apple device attached to the App Store (the case in question). Almost every mainstream site has verified mobile Webkit compatibility and/or dedicated applications. The group of people who still need Flash in that scenario is small enough that leaving it out wouldn't likely have a measurable effect on adoption. For a web product from a company that can't command as much market attention, shipping without Flash might well be a death knell. But Apple's different. The App Store is different.
    - weaties 17y ago
      I run click2flash, and I rarely click2flash. Caveats, I don't do casual games, and I don't watch a lot of videos off of different sites.
- SamAtt 17y ago
  One of the things you have to consider is Apple's strategic goals beyond the Tablet or even the iPhone. There's a larger strategic issue here. HTML 5 is going to reduce a lot of the need for Flash and Flash in turn is going to be forced back into it's traditional market of providing streaming media solutions. In that role they are Apple biggest competitor both in format (Quicktime) and content (streaming media competing with iTunes) By keeping Flash off the iPhone and the tablet Apple is taking their very high income audience and telling web site developers "Support us or risk losses in advertising". In doing that they're using the iPhone and the tablet to further the company as a whole. Something that might be worth losing a few sales in the short run
- tentonova2 17y ago
  I don't think it's necessarily a mistake if your goal is to strong-arm the industry towards abandoning Flash.
  - wallflower 17y ago
    "Were Flash Lite to gain momentum, it might make Adobe the Microsoft of mobiles, and Flash Lite the new Windows. That also makes it obvious why Apple wants to choke Flash to death before it falls into position as the new lowest common denominator in proprietary platforms on a new crop of mobile devices... And you thought the iPhone was just Apple's way of muscling into the mobile business! No, it’s really a proactive battle against a wide swatch of proprietary platforms promising to plague a new wave of mobile devices." http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-5595-4746-BFCE-524BBA7C7A85.html http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-559...
  - robertj 17y ago
    or if your goal is to get more people to get their content from the iTunes Store.
  - brianobush 17y ago
    The problem with flash (and the upside) is that it lets designers tackle the whole problem of site design, fonts, look and feel, etc in their domain. I would love to see flash replaced by html5 and css, but I think momentum is not on my side.
    - robertj 17y ago
      Yeah but take projects like typekit, for instance. Clearly there are businesses to be made in solving some of these problems, and smart designers understand the importance of web accessibility. It seems like as developers and designers we'll create much more wealth finding creative ways to abandon Flash.
- rauljara 17y ago
  The reason flash wasn't included on the cell phone was battery life: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/231806385/adobe-gets-bitchy-over-the-iphone-and-flash-bit http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/231806385/adobe-gets-bitc... Non-windows versions of flash have turned out to be incredibly inefficient: relatively simple flash banner ads make my otherwise near idle mac go wild. From what I've seen, it's even less efficient on Linux. Battery life is still going to be a huge concern for the apple tablet. If adobe gets its sh*t together, it may yet come to the tablet/iPhone OS. Until that time, it would be ridiculous for apple to allow that poorly designed of a virtual machine onto its otherwise energy efficient hardware.
- chollida1 17y ago
  I'm not so sure that's true. I have flash block installed on all my computers. I've never had a problem surfing the web.
- netcan 17y ago
  IMO, no flash is mostly a deal-breaker on media type stuff. Watching or listening to stuff. The application side of flash is smaller. I imagine Apple has it's own ideas for how media on the tablet should work.
ryanwaggoner 17y ago
I really hope he's wrong about several of these things (no flash, only apps from an app store, full Apple lockdown of everything). Why would I want another iPhone, just with a bigger screen? Especially when it's not clear when I'd use it over an iPhone or my Macbook? I can only handle so much of the Apple totalitarianism, especially if the damn thing costs $1500 or something.
- csuper 17y ago
  Unfortunately - I bet a lot of this is dead on. I can't imagine the device being more open than any other Apple product is.
  - ryanwaggoner 17y ago
    But that's just it...Apple's products vary widely in their degree of openness, from the iPod / iPhone / Apple TV on the end to their computers on the other end. So is this thing more like a computer (you buy it, you own it, hack it to hell and put anything you want on it), or an iPhone (you're basically renting this device from us, and we're going to dictate exactly what you can do with it)?
    - eli 17y ago
      I think we're just lucky that the paradigm for a desktop computer is already settled. Imagine if Apple started out as a company that distributes music and designs handheld devices before creating a computer. It's not hard to see a Mac OS that only lets you buy apps from an app store.
    - tcdent 17y ago
      It's my understanding that the original reason behind the closed architecture of the iPhone was to keep the device secure on cell networks. Most of the restrictions are there to protect outside access, which is a good thing for the less savvy users. Plenty believe the App Store and SDK were an afterthought, added only after people grumbled about the restrictions of web-only apps, which were the simplest way to guarantee 3rd party software was safe. Without the risk of an insecure cellular network, greed would be the only motivating factor in keeping this a closed device.
spazmaster 17y ago
The browsing experience will be more of a core thing for the Tablet than for the iPhone. One reason for this is that I expect the Tablet will replace the low-end MacBooks and will need to offer great e-mail and browsing experience. (Alas) too many sites currently rely on Flash to not include it in the Tablet OS.
- csuper 17y ago
  Form and function wise I just don't get tablets. I don't seem them replacing MacBooks.
  - sophacles 17y ago
    Laptops are kind of awkward when doing something besides sitting and using a laptop. So when cooking, or when gaming (bg more than vg), or fixing stuff around the house, or whatever, tablet form makes sense. It is an information lookup device, like puting documents on a clipboard, more than a laptop replacement.
GHFigs 17y ago
I'm amazed that anybody is still expecting Flash. Has the iPhone not conclusively demonstrated that Flash is a legacy feature of dwindling relevance?
- there 17y ago
  no, it hasn't. for video, maybe, but there are still a lot of websites that are useless on mobile safari without flash just for stupid things like animated menus.
  - axod 17y ago
    There will always be crazys using silverlight/flash/java applets for ridiculous things. Best avoid them.
    - boucher 17y ago
      As a developer, that is sound advice. As a user, it's silly. I don't get to decide which websites use flash and which don't, and technical limitations don't dictate which sites I want to visit.
      - axod 17y ago
        It works for me. That's why I've never been interested in adblocking software. If a site annoys me, I just don't go there any more. That's why I've hardly ever read any of the nytimes articles that get submitted here. Because they put them behind an irritating signup wall. There's accounts you can find on google but I really can't be bothered. It's not like there's a shortage of websites doing the same thing.
        allenp 17y ago
        I agree - plenty of sites, why visit one that annoys you - but I will say that with advertising it is becoming less and less the case that the site actually chooses or even knows what ads are showing on their site.
fragmede 17y ago
Take a traditional laptop and swap the position of the keyboard and the screen. Then, make the keyboard detachable and turn the screen into a touch screen. Voila, tablet PC. With a good industrial design house, someone could give it sex appeal, and between the iMac and the Macbook Air, thats the something different I'm dreaming of from Apple.
ori_b 17y ago
So, useless as a tablet PC, in summary.
patrik 17y ago
What really amazes me is the fact that even on this site, the discussion barely touches the app store issue. It might be true that the tablet will have a significant impact on tomorrow's computing platforms. But what really scares me is the prospect that it might become more and more accepted that the user will loose the freedom to decide what software he can install and thus what to do with the machine. This is something that goes against anything we learned from the open web and, of course, from "hacking" (jailbreaking does not count here). It goes against the central things I value at computing. By comparison, _I_ could not care less whether this thing comes with Flash or not.
- josefresco 17y ago
  For some reason I was under the impression that web apps would replace the app store apps. However like you I'm concerned that Apple will try to squash this in favor of controlling the entire app 'chain'. Our only hope is that web apps can be accepted before the idea of a 'pc app store' really takes hold.
- orangecat 17y ago
  Well said. The sort of control that Apple is trying to exert is terrible for both freedom and innovation; if Microsoft had it 15 years ago they never would have allowed the web to develop as it did. Yet Apple's fanboys are cheering them on as they position themselves to block any development that might interfere with their business model. This is a major reason why I ordered a Nexus One today to replace "my" iPhone, which Steve has made clear is only mine in the sense that I paid for it.
  - jsz0 17y ago
    15 years ago Microsoft held a monopoly on desktop operating systems. Apple is nowhere near a majority in the SmartPhone market today. I think there's very little chance they will ever hold that type of dominant position in the SmartPhone market so whatever they choose to do with the iPhone & App Store doesn't really impede the consumer's ability to choose an open platform. I think choice is a good thing. If someone wants an open platform they can get it. If someone wants a nicely packaged, but extremely functional and trouble free, platform Apple will sell it to them.
tvon 17y ago
I think the iTunes LP API (not sure what it's actually called) will play a very big part in this thing.
jsz0 17y ago
My guess is Apple's tablet is primarily designed as a competitor to PC net books. People have speculated about it being a MacBook replacement but there's a huge difference in the type of consumer buying a $350 net book and a $999+ MacBook. I think Apple has insulated their computer business from being cannibalized from lower end devices. Lots of people say "if I already have an iPhone and a MacBook why would I want a tablet?" and the answer probably is you don't. This product is not aimed at you. It's for the people who don't want a $999+ MacBook and are currently buying PC net books instead. As such I think the price will be <$499 (maybe a bit higher on launch just to cover supply & demand)
_funkyboy 17y ago
Probably Steve and friends think something like: why have I to complicate my life (and the user experience ov my customers) with some 3rd party technology?
zer0ne 17y ago
How iPhone or iPad are going to be the best web browser devises if Apple restrict content format from the Internet?

51 points by barredo 17y ago

Check out this week's MacBreak Weekly for more Gruber tablet speculations: http://twit.tv/mbw174 http://twit.tv/mbw174

Not including flash on a tablet seems like a mistake to me. It's one thing on a cell phone, but quite another on a device that will probably be positioned as a casual use computer.

axod 17y ago
The future isn't flash (IMHO). I think leaving it out makes absolute perfect sense. It also makes commercial sense - they don't want people playing flash games on the web, they want them buying games from the appstore.
- brk 17y ago
  The future isn't flash Yeah, well the future also isn't here yet. Flash still has much relevance for any web-surfing focused product shipping today.
  - simonw 17y ago
    Yes it is, it's just not yet evenly distributed.
    - josefresco 17y ago
      So that would mean that the 'evenly distributed' future isn't here yet? Wouldn't that still make it the future? Oh wait my head asploded.
      - axod 17y ago
        The point is sites are already using HTML video, websockets, canvas, etc etc etc. The future is now for websites and browsers that support it.
    - boucher 17y ago
      It really isn't. Mainstream sites still play video with Flash, and I doubt that is going to change in 2010. But, we'll see.
      - tewks 17y ago
        Most people (Youtube) use flash as a wrapper around h.264; the other codecs supported are pretty terrible.
    - wensing 17y ago
      The challenge comes when a business must make the majority of its revenue off those that haven't yet received the future. Still supporting IE6, aren't we?
  - wmeredith 17y ago
    I'm not sure about this. Or I should say I am sure this is wrong for me and I'm not sure about anyone else. I do about 1/3 of my internet surfing on my iPhone, at least an hour or two a day and I rarely miss the Flash. In fact, I'd say I'm actually glad it's not there. Most of my major online annoyances are Flash powered.
  - roc 17y ago
    Except perhaps for any high profile Apple device attached to the App Store (the case in question). Almost every mainstream site has verified mobile Webkit compatibility and/or dedicated applications. The group of people who still need Flash in that scenario is small enough that leaving it out wouldn't likely have a measurable effect on adoption. For a web product from a company that can't command as much market attention, shipping without Flash might well be a death knell. But Apple's different. The App Store is different.
  - weaties 17y ago
    I run click2flash, and I rarely click2flash. Caveats, I don't do casual games, and I don't watch a lot of videos off of different sites.
SamAtt 17y ago
One of the things you have to consider is Apple's strategic goals beyond the Tablet or even the iPhone. There's a larger strategic issue here. HTML 5 is going to reduce a lot of the need for Flash and Flash in turn is going to be forced back into it's traditional market of providing streaming media solutions. In that role they are Apple biggest competitor both in format (Quicktime) and content (streaming media competing with iTunes) By keeping Flash off the iPhone and the tablet Apple is taking their very high income audience and telling web site developers "Support us or risk losses in advertising". In doing that they're using the iPhone and the tablet to further the company as a whole. Something that might be worth losing a few sales in the short run
tentonova2 17y ago
I don't think it's necessarily a mistake if your goal is to strong-arm the industry towards abandoning Flash.
- wallflower 17y ago
  "Were Flash Lite to gain momentum, it might make Adobe the Microsoft of mobiles, and Flash Lite the new Windows. That also makes it obvious why Apple wants to choke Flash to death before it falls into position as the new lowest common denominator in proprietary platforms on a new crop of mobile devices... And you thought the iPhone was just Apple's way of muscling into the mobile business! No, it’s really a proactive battle against a wide swatch of proprietary platforms promising to plague a new wave of mobile devices." http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-5595-4746-BFCE-524BBA7C7A85.html http://www.roughlydrafted.com/RD/RDM.Tech.Q2.07/879DD82D-559...
- robertj 17y ago
  or if your goal is to get more people to get their content from the iTunes Store.
- brianobush 17y ago
  The problem with flash (and the upside) is that it lets designers tackle the whole problem of site design, fonts, look and feel, etc in their domain. I would love to see flash replaced by html5 and css, but I think momentum is not on my side.
  - robertj 17y ago
    Yeah but take projects like typekit, for instance. Clearly there are businesses to be made in solving some of these problems, and smart designers understand the importance of web accessibility. It seems like as developers and designers we'll create much more wealth finding creative ways to abandon Flash.
rauljara 17y ago
The reason flash wasn't included on the cell phone was battery life: http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/231806385/adobe-gets-bitchy-over-the-iphone-and-flash-bit http://adobegripes.tumblr.com/post/231806385/adobe-gets-bitc... Non-windows versions of flash have turned out to be incredibly inefficient: relatively simple flash banner ads make my otherwise near idle mac go wild. From what I've seen, it's even less efficient on Linux. Battery life is still going to be a huge concern for the apple tablet. If adobe gets its sh*t together, it may yet come to the tablet/iPhone OS. Until that time, it would be ridiculous for apple to allow that poorly designed of a virtual machine onto its otherwise energy efficient hardware.
chollida1 17y ago
I'm not so sure that's true. I have flash block installed on all my computers. I've never had a problem surfing the web.
netcan 17y ago
IMO, no flash is mostly a deal-breaker on media type stuff. Watching or listening to stuff. The application side of flash is smaller. I imagine Apple has it's own ideas for how media on the tablet should work.

ryanwaggoner 17y ago

I really hope he's wrong about several of these things (no flash, only apps from an app store, full Apple lockdown of everything). Why would I want another iPhone, just with a bigger screen? Especially when it's not clear when I'd use it over an iPhone or my Macbook? I can only handle so much of the Apple totalitarianism, especially if the damn thing costs $1500 or something.

csuper 17y ago
Unfortunately - I bet a lot of this is dead on. I can't imagine the device being more open than any other Apple product is.
- ryanwaggoner 17y ago
  But that's just it...Apple's products vary widely in their degree of openness, from the iPod / iPhone / Apple TV on the end to their computers on the other end. So is this thing more like a computer (you buy it, you own it, hack it to hell and put anything you want on it), or an iPhone (you're basically renting this device from us, and we're going to dictate exactly what you can do with it)?
  - eli 17y ago
    I think we're just lucky that the paradigm for a desktop computer is already settled. Imagine if Apple started out as a company that distributes music and designs handheld devices before creating a computer. It's not hard to see a Mac OS that only lets you buy apps from an app store.
  - tcdent 17y ago
    It's my understanding that the original reason behind the closed architecture of the iPhone was to keep the device secure on cell networks. Most of the restrictions are there to protect outside access, which is a good thing for the less savvy users. Plenty believe the App Store and SDK were an afterthought, added only after people grumbled about the restrictions of web-only apps, which were the simplest way to guarantee 3rd party software was safe. Without the risk of an insecure cellular network, greed would be the only motivating factor in keeping this a closed device.

spazmaster 17y ago

The browsing experience will be more of a core thing for the Tablet than for the iPhone. One reason for this is that I expect the Tablet will replace the low-end MacBooks and will need to offer great e-mail and browsing experience. (Alas) too many sites currently rely on Flash to not include it in the Tablet OS.

csuper 17y ago
Form and function wise I just don't get tablets. I don't seem them replacing MacBooks.
- sophacles 17y ago
  Laptops are kind of awkward when doing something besides sitting and using a laptop. So when cooking, or when gaming (bg more than vg), or fixing stuff around the house, or whatever, tablet form makes sense. It is an information lookup device, like puting documents on a clipboard, more than a laptop replacement.

GHFigs 17y ago

I'm amazed that anybody is still expecting Flash. Has the iPhone not conclusively demonstrated that Flash is a legacy feature of dwindling relevance?

there 17y ago
no, it hasn't. for video, maybe, but there are still a lot of websites that are useless on mobile safari without flash just for stupid things like animated menus.
- axod 17y ago
  There will always be crazys using silverlight/flash/java applets for ridiculous things. Best avoid them.
  - boucher 17y ago
    As a developer, that is sound advice. As a user, it's silly. I don't get to decide which websites use flash and which don't, and technical limitations don't dictate which sites I want to visit.
    - axod 17y ago
      It works for me. That's why I've never been interested in adblocking software. If a site annoys me, I just don't go there any more. That's why I've hardly ever read any of the nytimes articles that get submitted here. Because they put them behind an irritating signup wall. There's accounts you can find on google but I really can't be bothered. It's not like there's a shortage of websites doing the same thing.
      - allenp 17y ago
        I agree - plenty of sites, why visit one that annoys you - but I will say that with advertising it is becoming less and less the case that the site actually chooses or even knows what ads are showing on their site.

fragmede 17y ago

Take a traditional laptop and swap the position of the keyboard and the screen. Then, make the keyboard detachable and turn the screen into a touch screen. Voila, tablet PC. With a good industrial design house, someone could give it sex appeal, and between the iMac and the Macbook Air, thats the something different I'm dreaming of from Apple.

ori_b 17y ago

So, useless as a tablet PC, in summary.

patrik 17y ago

What really amazes me is the fact that even on this site, the discussion barely touches the app store issue. It might be true that the tablet will have a significant impact on tomorrow's computing platforms. But what really scares me is the prospect that it might become more and more accepted that the user will loose the freedom to decide what software he can install and thus what to do with the machine. This is something that goes against anything we learned from the open web and, of course, from "hacking" (jailbreaking does not count here). It goes against the central things I value at computing. By comparison, _I_ could not care less whether this thing comes with Flash or not.

josefresco 17y ago
For some reason I was under the impression that web apps would replace the app store apps. However like you I'm concerned that Apple will try to squash this in favor of controlling the entire app 'chain'. Our only hope is that web apps can be accepted before the idea of a 'pc app store' really takes hold.
orangecat 17y ago
Well said. The sort of control that Apple is trying to exert is terrible for both freedom and innovation; if Microsoft had it 15 years ago they never would have allowed the web to develop as it did. Yet Apple's fanboys are cheering them on as they position themselves to block any development that might interfere with their business model. This is a major reason why I ordered a Nexus One today to replace "my" iPhone, which Steve has made clear is only mine in the sense that I paid for it.
- jsz0 17y ago
  15 years ago Microsoft held a monopoly on desktop operating systems. Apple is nowhere near a majority in the SmartPhone market today. I think there's very little chance they will ever hold that type of dominant position in the SmartPhone market so whatever they choose to do with the iPhone & App Store doesn't really impede the consumer's ability to choose an open platform. I think choice is a good thing. If someone wants an open platform they can get it. If someone wants a nicely packaged, but extremely functional and trouble free, platform Apple will sell it to them.

tvon 17y ago

I think the iTunes LP API (not sure what it's actually called) will play a very big part in this thing.

jsz0 17y ago

My guess is Apple's tablet is primarily designed as a competitor to PC net books. People have speculated about it being a MacBook replacement but there's a huge difference in the type of consumer buying a $350 net book and a $999+ MacBook. I think Apple has insulated their computer business from being cannibalized from lower end devices. Lots of people say "if I already have an iPhone and a MacBook why would I want a tablet?" and the answer probably is you don't. This product is not aimed at you. It's for the people who don't want a $999+ MacBook and are currently buying PC net books instead. As such I think the price will be <$499 (maybe a bit higher on launch just to cover supply & demand)

_funkyboy 17y ago

Probably Steve and friends think something like: why have I to complicate my life (and the user experience ov my customers) with some 3rd party technology?

zer0ne 17y ago

How iPhone or iPad are going to be the best web browser devises if Apple restrict content format from the Internet?